Trends in low power frontend development for IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard, also known as ZigBee, is the most established standard for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). A key parameter in designing a ZigBee frontend is low power consumption, such that the maximum time of operation can be achieved with the available energy. Particularly, the RF Frontend has an important role, since most of the energy is consumed there. As various RF Frontend architectures are suitable for fulfilling the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. This paper focuses on comparing these architectures in terms of low power, complexity and performance. After a short introduction the different RF Frontend architectures are discussed in section 2 and section 3. Section 4 discusses future trends in PA designs for WSN ICs.